Monday, November 7, 2016

Don't vote for Donald Trump

Donald
Trump…is the candidate of idiocracy, and he’s convinced the nation’s idiots
that this is a selling point rather than a liability. Accordingly, his
popularity is the biggest argument against democracy you can possibly make.

Maybe
the voters have been watching too much House of Cards, because multiple
Republican candidates seem to have convinced them that the sum of foreign
relations is who flinches first in some Hollywood stare-down with Putin.

Trump
is perhaps tied with Kanye West as the most conceited person I have ever known
to exist. Everything he says and does is geared exclusively towards his own
self-promotion. His speeches can be summed up in a few short sentences: “I am a winner, they are all losers. I am
brilliant, they are all stupid. I make great deals, they only fail.” In the
absence of any discernable governing ideology or any specific policy proposals,
this is all his campaign rests upon. His only belief is that he is awesome and
can do whatever he wants. His only tone of voice is condescension. He has nurtured a cult of personality, and
that personality is ‘pompous, egocentric asshole.’

If
this is what he says over the course of six months of scripted campaigning, can
you even imagine what he’d say over the course of four unscripted years as
president? The man is a buffoon, a stooge, a dancing rodeo clown out to make
American politics into more of a reality TV show than it already was.

We
have the stereotypical college graduate on one side, and the stereotypical high
school bully on the other, with the most powerful office on earth in the
balance, and most Republicans would seemingly rather elect the bully. This
should be horrifying to any thinking person. There’s a word for those who
select most violent and aggressive male in the group as their leader: animals.
Cave-men, to be generous. Evolved human beings are supposed to have developed a
level of intellect and sensitivity and foresight which lets them choose leaders
with more noble qualities than brutishness – or better yet, a level of humility
to admit when they are not informed enough on the topic at hand to agitate for
one candidate or another.

Trump
is the candidate for stupid, cowardly or bigoted people who prefer the faked
certainty of aggressive sound-bytes to the cognitive dissonance of reasoned
exchange.

And, finally, the thesis of that rant:

“If Donald Trump becomes the next president of the United States,
it would so rattle my faith in our country’s system of government that I could
no longer go to war for that government in good conscience… The uniform I wear
so proudly now would come to symbolize something completely different were
Trump the man in charge of the Armed Forces: gullibility. To fair-minded people
of the world, Trump’s soldiers would symbolize blind, unthinking obedience to
orders, no matter how preposterous the man giving them happened to be….

How could I travel, and meet people from other countries, and not
be ashamed? How could I swear solemn, stony-faced vows to obey the every order
of such a cartoonish character? How could I watch serious world leaders
converge in the UN to discuss the important issues of the day, and not be
struck by how absurd it is that the most powerful among them is the douchebag
from The Apprentice? How could I pretend that the fire-hose of thoughtless
misogyny and narcissism and stupidity that spurts out of his mouth gave me
legitimate moral authority to kill people?

He is one hair’s breadth more qualified to be president than Kim
Kardashian, and that may be unfair to her. I signed up to defend my country,
not to be a henchman for some self-obsessed circus clown.”

The ten months of campaigning which followed that entry have
proved I went too easy on him. Over that
time, Trump used the forum of a presidential debate to remark on the size of
his penis. He was caught on tape saying “you
gotta treat women like shit,” and “when
you’re a star, they let you…grab em’ by the pussy.” He joked that Carly
Fiorina couldn’t be president because her face was too ugly. He said respected
Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly should be discredited because “she had blood coming out of her wherever.” He said husbands who
change diapers are “acting like the wife.”
He called Hillary Clinton disgusting for needing to pee; he called Rosie
O’Donnell disgusting for being fat; he called an attorney disgusting for
needing to breastfeed.

12 women have come forward accusing him of sexual assault, and
many others of sexual harassment. In conjunction with his comments above, this
means he is almost definitely a serial sexual predator. He blamed sexual
assault in the military on “putting men
and women together.” Almost every account of his treatment of women – from
Miss America pageant competitors, to The Apprentice competitors, to work
colleagues, to even his own daughters – corroborates his misogynistic obsession
with their physical appearance. He once said “it doesn’t really matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young
and beautiful piece of ass.”

He disparaged John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam
War. He said a judge should recuse himself from a case about Trump University
because of his Mexican heritage. He responded to the Orlando nightclub shooting
with a Tweet that read “Appreciate the
congrats for being right on Islamic terrorism.” He made up inflated
statistics about the rate at which blacks kill whites and relayed them as fact.
Actually, he has lied hundreds of times, not with minor hyperbolic
exaggerations, but with plainly disprovable falsities he simply made up. He has
proven his racist and misogynist tendencies beyond doubt. His Twitter account
is its own parody.

His campaign is almost completely devoid of substance, and what
substance there is – on immigration, trade, fiscal policy and counterterrorism
– is horrifying without exception. He
has enthusiastically endorsed torture and killing the families of terror
suspects, both obvious war crimes under the Geneva Convention. He wants to ban all Muslims – 1.6 billion
members of an entire religion – from entering the country, shut down Mosques,
and create a database to track all Muslims currently in the country. He wants
to deport two million people, including some who are already citizens. He has
repeatedly praised tyrannical regimes for their “strength” in violently
suppressing dissent, from Putin to Assad to Kim Jong Il to Saddam Hussein to
China’s Communist Party. He defended FDR’s internment of Japanese citizens in
WWII. He described global warming as a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. He threatened to shut down the Washington
Post once elected for their negative coverage of him. He threatened to jail his opponent as well.

I
could go on, but it's 2:21 AM and I simply don't have the time. Donald Trump is the hemorrhoid on the ass-cheek of humanity. Don't vote for him.